


The Nine Times Peeta Mellark Fell in Love

by Meadowlark27



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Post-Mockingjay, Pre-Epilogue, and an eventual toastbaby, lots of growing together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 14:04:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4224555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meadowlark27/pseuds/Meadowlark27
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How a hijacked Peeta fell in love with Katniss Everdeen all over again. Pre-epilogue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nine Times Peeta Mellark Fell in Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the anon on Tumblr that asked "Can you write a drabble where Peeta falls back in love with Katniss after being hijacked?"
> 
> Hope this is what you were looking for. Forgive me for the incoherence; most of this was written at four in the morning.

**#09 – The Averted Suicide** ****

Her arrow launches through the air, slicing through time and space and flesh, and he watches in shock as the limp body of President Coin plummets from the lip of the balcony.

Over the gasping and the screaming, he hears laughter—choked, gurgly laughter. Snow sits with scarlet dripping from the corner of his mouth as he cackles until he's sputtering, buckling forward.

_What has she done?_

He lurches to the side to see her standing there, her bow still crooked in the air. Her eyes—those aluminum moons that are so beautiful and so nightmarish they make him want to tear apart his own skeleton—are still. Flat. The world around her is condensing, the grey uniforms closing in to take her away.

But he knows she won't let them.

He realizes what she's doing right before she does. There's a little violet capsule in her sleeve, one that'll end it all, but he can't let her. Her voice rallies in the back of his head somewhere through that shiny haze,  _Because that's what you and I do. Protect each other._

And he has to protect her, because that's what they  _do_ , because he needs to defend her even though he's still trying to understand  _why_. But the moment he feels her teeth on his flesh, the moment she bites the hand that covers the capsule, preventing her from killing herself, he knows why.

Those quicksilver eyes fill with confusion and anger as she draws back, her teeth twinkling with red. "Let me go!" she snarls, grasping for him, grasping to pull him away, grasping to keep him from protecting her  _like they do_.

"I can't," he murmurs, tearing the pill from her sleeve just as the grey uniforms converge.

He can't, because they protect each other, because he needs her to survive, he needs her to  _live_ , because even though his blood still burns with venom whenever she's near he still loves her.

It doesn't make much sense, but he doesn't suppose it has to. He doesn't remember what it felt like to love her  _before_ , but he knows he did, and he must now, too.

 

**#08 – The Primrose Bushes**

"You're back."

Even though her voice is hollow it still coats his skin like honey, and he lowers his dirt-caked hands as he turns to look at her. He hasn't seen her in weeks, months, maybe; her olive skin clings to her bones for dear life, her cheeks sunken in, her hair matted in all sorts of ways. She's not particularly pretty, but even now when she looks like a walking pile of bones, he thinks she's absolutely beautiful.

"Dr. Aurelius wouldn't let me leave the Capitol until yesterday," he tells her as he instinctively wipes his dirty palms on his shirt. "By the way, he said to tell you he can't pretend he's treating you forever. You have to pick up the phone."

She lifts a pencil-sharp elbow and pushes at her hair, ignoring his memorandum. "What are you doing?" She's eyeing the bushes he's embedded by the foundation of the house, her eyes solid as steel, defensive, suspicious.

"I went to the woods this morning." The words are small in his throat.  _God, he missed her. He still misses her._  "And dug these up for her."

_For Prim. For you._

He wants her to remember the good things; he wants to help her. He's spent enough time with Dr. Aurelius these past few weeks to be able to sort through much of what's real and what isn't. And what he feels for Katniss, this sympathetic need to comfort her, is real. Always real.

At first her face warps in anger, her entire body quivering, and he thinks he must've really fucked it up this time. He raises his hands to explain, to apologize, but then the storm in her eyes calms.

She nods. She doesn't say anything else. She turns and runs into the house.

He momentarily wants to follow her, to tell her he's sorry—what for? He doesn't suppose it really matters at this point—but maybe she needs space. Maybe she just needs time to sort through her own mind.

And he'll let her do that. He'll give her peace. Because when a person is in love, they do what's best for the other.

 

**#07 – The Bread**

He knocks twice. Sae answers.

"The girl's in the dinin' room, if you'd like to see her."

He smiles sheepishly and holds out the tiny parcel in his hands. "I brought bread."

"Good. Maybe she'll finally feed that starvin' body of hers." She leads him through the house.

The air tastes like stale cotton and smells of fabric softener. It's not like his house—his hums with the aroma of rising dough, since he's been baking so much, because baking helps remind him of who he is. _He's a baker. He's a painter. He likes to sleep with the window open._

She's curled up at the table with her knees tucked in her chest, staring vacantly at a bowl of stew like it's a pile of ash. She must hear him come in, because his gait is so uneven and loud—he doesn't remember everything from  _before_  but he remembers her telling him he practically stomps whenever he walks—but she doesn't turn to look at him.

He stills by the arm of her chair.

"I brought you bread." He coughs. "Cheese buns." He coughs again. "You like those."

If he doesn't know any better, he'd think her lips are forming a small smile. It makes his heart pump warmth, his thoughts untangle, his tongue taste like sugar. He smiles back.

_He's a baker. He's a painter. He loves it when Katniss Everdeen smiles._

After he's been hovering over her for an obscene length of time, she gestures groggily to the chair beside her.

"You can sit with me. I can't eat them all by myself."

He nods and takes a seat, his fingers deftly untangling the string around the bread.

They eat in silence, but he doesn't mind, because he's learned that any time at all with Katniss is precious. And at least she's eating—she looks like she hasn't eaten since the Stone Age.

After a while he hears her voice chasing the silence from the room.

"Thank you for remembering. About the bread, I mean."

Her eyes are glued to her untouched stew, her shoulders caved in. Her hair is braided today, and a stray tendril has escaped and hangs over her brow, and he wants more than anything to reach out and push it behind her ear, but he knows it's too soon to touch her.

"I remember a lot of things," he tells her quietly, his voice as thin and pliant as medical gauze, but his confession makes her eyes flicker up to his. Silver meets blue, and his soul feels like it's made of lead.

_He's a baker. He's a painter. He loves Katniss_  Everdeen.

 

**#06 – The Nightmare**

He comes to her house for dinner most nights. She technically never invites him, but her face lights up just enough when he arrives for him to know that his company is valued.

And after, they sit in her living room. He draws. She writes. He paints. She watches him.

They don't speak much, or at all, really, but their silences don't feel hollow. Her presence alone is enough to fill the empty holes in his chest, plugging up the cavities left by the venom, because although his memories are incomplete and patchy at least they can fill the gaps with new ones.

One evening he looks away from his canvas to see her curled up on the couch, fast asleep. The lines of her face are so smooth in slumber, the steady rise-and-fall of her chest palliative, and he smiles at her for a moment before returning to his work.

Not much time has passed before the quiet is filled sharpened whimpers. Katniss is thrashing on the cushions, her face pinched up and her muscles trembling. In a heartbeat, Peeta is at her side, his arms wrapping around her, his lips grazing her ear.

"Shh, it's okay, it's okay. It's just a nightmare. You're okay."

Soon her eyes flutter open, and her body calms, but her irises are milky and her expression is contorted. It tugs at his heartstrings to see her in pain.

So he doesn't protest when she asks him to come lay with her. He hasn't done this since  _before_ , because even though he wants to feel their heat collide, he doesn't always trust himself around her, doesn't trust himself  _not_  to fall into a hijacking episode, but she asks for him now. And he can't refuse Katniss. He knows he was never able to  _before_ , and that's a habit that's carried through to the present.

And when she asks him to stay the night, he tells her, "Always." Always, because he'll always be there, because he'll always help, because he'll always love her.

Because he always has.

 

**#05 – The Song**

The last thing he remembers before he drowns is the feeling of the hard-backed chair underneath his knuckles.

And then it's all fire, orange and yellow and pearl-white flames licking up his skin in angry tongues, and he sees her, sees her silvery eyes and everything that he loves in her but it's not  _her_  anymore. The mutt-Katniss smiles wickedly. He screams.  _Give me Katniss back. Give her back to me._

Everything around him smells like smoke, blood, and rust. His mouth tastes like he's swallowing kerosene.

_Give her back to me._

He may be under for twenty seconds or twenty minutes, but through the inferno there's suddenly a sound drifting from somewhere far off. Its cadence spills water over the flames and the smoke turns to velvet, and he feels arms around him, around his waist, around his abdomen.

The sound grows louder and nearer. And then he's five again. Her dress is red. Her hair is in two braids instead of one. He thought he'd forgotten this, but as his mind breaks through the surface of psychosis to the sound of her melody, he remembers the first time he heard her sing.

When his eyes flutter open, he sees her olive-tainted, scarred wrists crossed over his stomach, still taut from the abating flashback. She's holding him, singing into his shoulder. Coaxing him back to reality.

It's the first time he's had an episode around her, and he'd been afraid since the day he returned that he wouldn't be able to control it, that he'd hurt her.

But she's not afraid of him. Not anymore.

She trusts him.

And he loves her for it.

 

**#04 – The Kiss**

Peeta can spin words on a loom with his silver tongue, he can charm populations, he can bake cheese buns that bring their consumers close to ecstasy, but he can  _not_  let himself control the pace of his and Katniss's relationship. That is for her to do, only her,  _always_  her, because even in his own fragility she's more delicate than he.

She will come to him when she's ready.

She's ready when winter blooms outside their open window. He's been sleeping in her bed for months now, because the nightmares seem more scared of them together than apart. She sleeps better with his arms fending them off, and he sleeps better knowing that things are not all that different than they were  _before,_  knowing that she's comfortable with him, knowing that now, her touch heals him more than it hurts him.

And one night, when the wind is particularly angry and the moon is particularly bright, she turns to him under the sheets and kisses him right on the mouth. Right there. For no reason at all.

Once his lungs remember how to breathe he kisses her back, the taste of her tongue sending him back to  _before_. She tastes like the color orange. Warm, soft, brilliant, everything.

Orange is his favorite color, after all. She even told him so.

After, when he asks her why she did it, she just shrugs and gives him one of those shy-yet-so-damn-beautiful smiles of hers, and their lips melt together all over again.

The love he feels now is the same type of love he felt before the Capitol took that love away and warped it into red anger. She's since sculpted his warped love with those nimble hands of hers into the pure, golden, all-encompassing love it was before, only it's stronger now.

It just keeps growing and growing like a weed. Like a dandelion.

 

**#03 – The Scars**

He comes upstairs one day to find her standing before the full-length mirror, her eyes puffed up and pink like cotton candy. She's not wearing any clothes.

Katniss has always been modesty's biggest fan, and so instinctively he turns away to give her privacy, but then he hears her whimper.

"I'm broken, Peeta."

He's behind her in a heartbeat, gazing at her in the mirror. He doesn't see the brokenness she speaks of; all he can see is silver eyes and honey-copper skin and raven hair.

But he knows what she's looking at. What she's referencing. Her skin is stitched with rose-colored flesh, puckered and patchy.

He leans in to press a soft kiss to the curve of her neck where a burn scar laces her skin.

"Have you ever heard of a mosaic?" he asks softly. "They're collages of little broken pieces all laid out in a pretty pattern, and the cracks in between are filled with cement. But they aren't treasured for their cement or the fact that they're made of shards of clay. They're valued because they were once broken, but the damage has made them into something better. Made them more beautiful."

He doesn't know if that will make her feel any better, so he unbuttons his own shirt, too, to show her that she's not the only mosaic in their home.

She touches his scars. He lets her. He wipes his thumb under her eye to catch a teardrop. He kisses  _her_  scars. He carries her to the bedroom so he can kiss her scars more. So he can kiss  _all_  of them.

And when every jagged cord of pink flesh has been kissed, he brings his lips to hers. "You're the most beautiful mosaic I've ever seen, Miss Katniss Everdeen."

Because she is. Because he loves her scars. Because he loves her.

 

**#02 – The First Time**

He's not sure when kisses became not enough, or when soft, shy touches stopped satiating her, or when his lips peppering her entire body fanned her fire instead of taming it, but one day it's just  _not_  enough, and she asks him— _tells_ him, really—to make love to her.

He still can't refuse Katniss.

He still  _doesn't want to_  refuse Katniss.

He undresses her carefully, and kisses her carefully, and moves his hand between them carefully. His first priority is making her comfortable, and his second priority is not going into cardiac arrest.

With his lips on hers to collect the soft whimpering, he brings her close with his fingers. But when he replaces his fingers with his mouth, there's nothing keeping her sounds from filling the bedroom, and he thinks no song has ever been as beautiful. She tangles her hands in his soft, golden hair as he tastes her, brings her closer, brings her there. He doesn't want to stop even after her grasp has tightened and her legs have clamped around his ears, and he can physically feel her shattering under his tongue, but she pulls him up to her level before he can keep going. She whispers sweet things to him, guides him closer, guides him in, and he instantly realizes not going into cardiac arrest should be his first priority.

But he still does everything to make her comfortable, making sure it doesn't hurt. He allows her to adjust before he moves, listens to her sharp gasps to know what was good and what was bad. He's just as new to this as her, so they learn together.

After they've tumbled over the edge, collapsing into a fused mess of boneless gelatin, panting and giggling, he decides he couldn't love her more.

That is, until he asks her the question that's been weighing on his mind for months.

_You love me. Real or not real?_

When she responds, the word "more" is quickly redefined.

 

**#01 – The Miracle**

He missed it. He  _can't believe he missed it._  His entire life has been a beautiful preamble to this, to this  _very goddamn moment_ , and he  _missed it._

He wants to hit himself in the head with a brick. He was in the Capitol when he got the call—he has these stupid yearly appointments with Dr. Aurelius and he thought this one was especially ill-timed, but he had two weeks before  _it_  was supposed to happen, so he thought he'd be alright, but  _oh how wrong he was_ —and he was on the train within the hour. He couldn't stay in his seat. He paced back and forth down the aisle, ignoring concerned glances from the other passengers.

Haymitch meets him at Twelve's train station. Peeta's hair is a mess of angry, wayward curls and his eyes are panicked.

"How is she?"

The older man gives him that stupid condescending smirk of his that Peeta's grown to tolerate over the years.

"They're perfect."

Peeta takes off running.

And then he's there, tearing into the clinic, bolting down the hall like a racehorse on crack, pushing through the door which he knows she— _they_ —will be behind, and—

He can't remember how to speak.

She's propped up against a pile of pillows, tangled raven hair pleated over her shoulder, eyes cast down on the tiny bundle in her arms. She'd been worried (he wasn't) that she wouldn't be good at this. That she wouldn't love their little miracle as much as she should. That she was too broken.

But her eyes are the size of moons, her expression one of both wonder and devotion, and Peeta has never been so in love with his wife of fifteen years as he is now. As he watches her hold their miracle child in her slender arms.

She doesn't look up to acknowledge his presence.

"She has your eyes."

She.  _She_.

A girl.

He'd always wanted a daughter. Especially if she was anything like her mother.

He's by her bedside before Katniss can blink, gazing in awe down at the little white bundle. A tiny head is wedged in the fabric, skin still pink from delivery with a tuft of cocoa hair and an impossibly small nose. At the moment, her eyes are closed.

She's the sun and the moon and the stars, all in one six-pound being.

"I'm so sorry I missed it," he whispers, his voice breaking.

"It actually may have been better that you weren't here," Katniss chuckles, looking up to him, finally. "I got a little violent. Started throwing things. Started screaming. I probably would've lacerated or broken something of yours."

Her humor is slightly comforting, but his chest still aches. "Katniss, I'm your  _husband_. I should've been—"

"You will be for the next one," she laughs, and even though he knows she's joking, his veins burst with sunlight.

They both turn their attention back to the tiny parcel of life in her arms, and he has never thought something that bore such an acute resemblance to an alien could be so beautiful.

His daughter.  _Their_  daughter. Oh, god, he has a daughter.

"She's… real?"

Katniss chuckles. "Very, very real, Peeta." She looks up to her husband again, her sweat-coated skin practically glowing. "Would you like to hold her?"

_Is that even a question?_

He tries to calm his trembling as he nods, opening his arms for the little blanket burrito. But then his entire core tenses in fear, his veins turning to icy heat—what if he does something wrong? What if he hurts her?

Peeta has been good with babies since he practically  _was_  one, but in this moment he feels so hopelessly inadequate.

Until he feels her warmth through the blanket. She's so miraculously tiny—the size of a loaf of bread, but her weight is something completely foreign yet so entrancing in its peculiarity. He tucks her into his broad chest, supporting the weight of her snowball-sized head against his arm, and almost as if the baby knows he's her father, she tilts her head in his direction.

His eyes are stinging like they've been submerged in acid, and his throat is tight, and his cheeks ache from smiling so fully.

His voice shakes as he murmurs, "Hey there, baby girl. It's nice to finally meet you."

In his arms, the loaf-sized being stirs at the sound of his voice, her rosy little lips parting.

He brings his thumb up to brush it over her cheek. Her skin feels like silk against his calloused thumb; so perfect, so  _unscarred_ , and he vows then and there that he will never let anything touch his daughter. He and Katniss have been beat and broken more times than they can count, but he won't allow that to happen to their baby. Ever.

As his thumb swipes over her skin, the child's brows pucker up—she actually  _frowns_ —and he can't help but laugh through the looming tears because she's only a few hours old and she's already adopted Katniss's signature scowl.

Oh, god. He's going to love the life out of this child. He knows it already.

"You look just like your mama, don't you?" he coos, craning his neck to press a feather-light kiss to her forehead.

When he draws back, he watches as her contorted face suddenly smooths, her eyes fluttering open.

A sharp breath swells in his lungs as his entire galaxy bursts with color.

It takes only a second before her eyes— _his_  eyes—find their focus, zeroing in on his face, and he chokes out something of a startled sob as he watches his daughter watch him for the first time with the ocean in her irises.

He's been told that babies can't smile, but as he pathetically tries to hold himself together he  _swears_  the corners of her mouth curl up just a bit into a grin that is so  _Katniss_  it makes him crumble.

As he watches his features seamlessly merge with his wife's on the palette of their daughter's beautifully alien face, he suddenly knows.

Just as he did on that day so many years ago, the day when his not-yet-wife's teeth found his hand instead of the pill that would've ended their future before it began, he knows he's falling in love. The feeling is warmth, is unity, is the color orange, is the taste of cheese buns, is the collision of universes and galaxies, is completeness, is everything.

It's love.

And it's real.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on Tumblr at the-peeta-pocket. Let's be friends.


End file.
